Book Image

Drupal 9 Module Development - Third Edition

By : Daniel Sipos
Book Image

Drupal 9 Module Development - Third Edition

By: Daniel Sipos

Overview of this book

With its latest release, Drupal 9, the popular open source CMS platform has been updated with new functionalities for building complex Drupal apps with ease. This third edition of the Drupal Module Development guide covers these new Drupal features, helping you to stay on top of code deprecations and the changing architecture with every release. The book starts by introducing you to the Drupal 9 architecture and its subsystems before showing you how to create your first module with basic functionality. You’ll explore the Drupal logging and mailing systems, learn how to output data using the theme layer, and work with menus and links programmatically. Once you’ve understood the different kinds of data storage, this Drupal guide will demonstrate how to create custom entities and field types and leverage the Database API for lower-level database queries. You’ll also learn how to introduce JavaScript into your module, work with various file systems, and ensure that your code works on multilingual sites. Finally, you’ll work with Views, create automated tests for your functionality, and write secure code. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned how to develop custom modules that can provide solutions to complex business problems, and who knows, maybe you’ll even contribute to the Drupal community!
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
3
Chapter 3: Logging and Mailing

Chapter 4: Theming

The most obvious part of Drupal's theming system is the Appearance admin page found at admin/appearance, which lists all the themes installed on your website:

Figure 4.1: Appearance admin page

When you choose a theme from the Appearance page, you are applying a specific graphic design to your website's data and functionality. However, the applied theme is in reality only a small part of the entire theming layer.

This book focuses mostly on building modules that encapsulate chunks of functionality. However, since we're ultimately building a web application, everything output by our functionality will need to be marked up with HTML. In Drupal, this process of wrapping data in HTML and CSS is called theming.

In this chapter, we will discuss how our module integrates with the theme layer. We will talk about the architecture of the system, theme templates, hooks, render arrays, and others. Then, we will provide some practical...